Orson Welles Interviews Poet Dick Bakken,

Burning Bright

Orson Welles Interviews Poet Dick Bakken,
Copper Queen Hotel Saloon, Bisbee, Arizona,
Labor Day, September 5, 2005




Dick Bakken at home in Bisbee, Arizona on June 26, 1989, anniversary of
Custer’s 7th Cavalry discovered massacred. Photo by Andreas Rentsch


ORSON: In another interview, in inimitable style, the interviewer asks, “Where does the Dick Bakken story begin?” You reply, “In Montana wild horse country. I got arrested in Helena when I was seven for riding a man killer bareback.” That is how a lot of great stories of the West might begin. But . . . really? Where did you grow up and what was it like?

DB: It was just like that, there yet swirled in the mists of the old West. In 1948 on the outermost edge of Helena, the last house against the surrounding hillsides full of pines, caves, one mountain lion, and a clobbered jail breaker dragged back down through our yard—I was seven. Custer’s Last Stand was only 100 miles and 65 years away. The valleys from there to where I waited in camp with the women cooking beans for the men to whoop over the rise with their roundup were yet running with the offspring of Crazy Horse’s mustangs. Downstairs below us lived a real bronc buster, Rex, with his wife Dotty and cowboy sons Toby and Star. Rex’s white stud—his share of the annual wild horse roundup—bucked in the corral just out our back door. It scraped me off with the pine branch that overhung its corral. But this wasn’t the killer that had already trampled two men. I came upon that one out in the hills tethered to a log, where owners believed isolation from people assured. I didn’t know it had sprung from the gore of Medusa.

I was born in 1941 in Custer County, Montana, grew rapidly there in Miles City, then Glendive, Bozeman, Helena—swirled in the myth of the wild West—but from eight years old on, I evolved more leisurely in that valley west of Spokane, Washington, steeped in the myth of archetypal farmland, backdrop for my poem “Learning to Drive,” propelled by plunging energy I’d inhaled headlong back in Helena wild horse and gold fever country.

ORSON: I’m asking only because somewhere down the line, if beauty wins out, people who love poetry will want to know, for the usual reasons. I want to know. Your poetry is unique. There is nothing like it. I hope I can say this so that it makes some sense. After reading—specifically the poems in your Greatest Hits—other poetry makes me feel like, for a while anyway, Dracula watching old Dracula movies. You speak elsewhere of the vehicle for your poetry—energy, imagery, and voice. You say, “I don’t think my poems up. They aren’t a message or a viewpoint or an idea. I’m working in another realm.” Right. And you’ll leave saying what that is—to the critics. So, I’ve looked at what they say and mostly it doesn’t get at what’s there and not there in your poems.

DB: My whole mortal job is to receive the poems, not to explain them or how or why they work.

ORSON: However, talking of receiving poems you write, “I’m here—

—but in open partnership with a god, a force, a Muse,
whatever you want to call it. It may just be the breathable,
inspiriting possibilities of language and words and sound.

So who is the god, what the force, what inspiriting possibilities? I’d say, whatever god, force, or possibilities rise above a suffered world into a realm I can compare only to that accessed by fairy tale—the realm of folktales. Hans Christian Andersen territory.

DB: I feel the echo of “What immortal hand or eye . . . What the hand . . . and what art . . . In what furnace . . .” Yes, William Blake’s “The Tyger” in his Songs of Innocence and Experience is a perfect touchstone for your questions about source, fairytale, the realm of innocence co-existing with what is fierce and dark.

ORSON: Your poems make me entirely happy because I experience unique beauty, of the sort that somehow finds its way pointing to a strange star that, for the instant, absorbs the viewer with its own aura that has nothing to do with this world—in that moment feels truer. Ah, the god. More later. But—instead of telling us what your poems mean, can you tell us what makes you happy with your poetry and, yes, can you maybe look into what I am saying and tell me what I am trying to get at? I’m a reader—maybe beholder is better. Your poems have affected me this way. Talk to me.

DB: When I speak of that god, a force we call the Muse—I am making literal reference. She exists. Not if you open from your head. Only if, like a child, you open from your heart—to the realm of invisible friends, monsters under the bed, and magical incantation. When you grow up into and profess from your head, you lose that burning brightness, the truest poetry.

ORSON: OK, one day in 1970 you just walk away from your professorship—life tenure, years of MFA sagacity, department meetings, the official poetry world. They require a resignation letter but you give them an incantation that blazes from another world. You exit to become that poet. So, how did you know this was the way? You were reacting against university corporate complicity in the horrors back then but also going on the road towards something and that was years ago. What did you feel you were moving toward and are you happy how it turned out?

DB: I was so young and ignorant—not yet 28—and foolish. Thank goodness that killer let me ride, even after I sprawled off under its hooves! Fairytales say it is always the untried child, that one laughed at, a foolish innocent, who steps right into the dark forest—after two worldly brothers have failed—and one day rides back out, lips ashine, showing that he raised the grail.

ORSON: I love how you talk about poetry—so much usually confused clarified—especially a reminder, apropos to titling your weekly poetry column, that a poem isn’t the words on paper:

I don’t feel that poetry is just words on paper, that it’s movable type, that it’s just books. I feel that what’s on paper is simply the notation. We never get that reality confused in music. We know that the score, the sheet music, is just the notation, that the music is something other. But for some reason, everyone thinks that the poem is the ink that’s on the paper, that it is the page. It’s been only 500 years since Gutenberg. For thousands and thousands and thousands of years there was no movable type, no printing, no books like there are now—and poetry was a magical force and not an object. One of the panoramas that the image “Ink that Echoes” flashes to me is that, yes, there’s print, the way we do it now, but print is in actuality a translation of the more fluid luminous streaking of a handwritten stream of ink, that echoes a deeper tradition, a more primal source. Poetry still reverberates that torrid orchestra of the original star-raining creation. It’s not simply dried ink on paper. The ink is just one more tool.

So may I read some luminous ink from your Greatest Hits? A really fine poem:


THE BLACK-RATSNAKE RITUAL

for Marge Piercy

Through her pampered beanyard
comes the well repairman snorting
in his overalls.
—Be careful of my beans!
He cuffs spider thread out of his way.
—Don’t hurt them!
He feels like throwing his toolbox—right
down her busted well—at the
four-foot snake hissing in that hole
full of bugs. The woman,
hair shooting out thick, black, jumps out
of her vines. She never lets him spray the bugs.
Because spiders in the well
eat them. The mice eat the spiders. The snake
eats the mice. She dumps beans
out of a paper bag,
glaring at his heavy boots and hammer.
—I don’t want you hurting my snake.
He tromps around the well bitching to himself,
sidestepping her beans, while she
disappears deep into the hole with his flashlight.
He slaps his overalls
when he hears her wooing and clucking
and rolls his eyes up at the sky.
There’s something like a kiss.
Then she’s up grinning with the furious snake
round and round in the paper bag.
Down goes the grumbling
repairman. Snorts and scuffs resonate up
through the well.
She keeps watch on his flash beam,
on his sniffing and clanking.
He feels her watching, feels bugs all over him,
curses, slams off the light to kick
at dusty gobs of webs.
—And don’t you hurt any of my mice either!
He sneezes, bumps his head hard.
—Son of a—
—What? she calls down, wanting to see, nearly
stepping on her beans. —What?
Hand on forehead, he blinks up dazed
through the long narrow dark, sees stars and stars . . .
around a black shape, a vine-haired woman
leaning far above, peering
down, holding a big lumpy bag.


ORSON: I promised I would get back to fairy tales and this is a prime example. Here is Jack and the Beanstalk inverted. You present a descent from the bean yard into a well where an abiding snake (with everything glittering and rich and ambiguous it represents) is safeguarded by that mythic silhouette, hallucinated by our hero as he looks up into light after conking his head deep in the well:

a vine-haired woman
leaning far above, peering
down, holding a big lumpy bag.


It’s hilarious and cool and would make Joseph Campbell so giddy. The action depicted is “ritual.” There is a zaniness and happiness, having fun and more with the poor guy in the well, that I haven’t found in other poets. And by “zany” I mean that attribute linked with the spiritual as suggested by Robert Bly. Discerning listeners will know what I mean. You said that this 1975 poem “was created in Allendale, Michigan, after a walk through a cemetery with Marge Piercy, who told me her true story there.” So, whatever that story was, you have transmuted it using and renewing those universal figures. Can you tell us how the original story became the poem?

DB: The universal is most powerfully present in the particular. I had just met Marge and we were fast becoming companions. She was a little goofy herself, fun-loving, and a strong feminist who tithed 10% of her earnings right back into the Movement. As she laughed that story of her busted well, infused with the outlandish particulars of her own character, I sidestepped new graves, flashing the symbolic confrontation between an ardent, outspoken woman and a good old-fashioned man. Of course, I shaped and embellished a bit. But I had such fun composing it, the joke of the seriousness of such collision, year after year, each time her well went haywire. Thus, a ritual. It was after I was getting all the hilarious particulars of caricature in place—which is what inspired and goosed the poem into being, such a wildly funny story—that I recognized deeper archetypal dimensions of well, snake, and lumpy bag.

So it is interesting that you mention Robert Bly. “The Black-Ratsnake Ritual” scared him silly. A couple years after creating this poem, I was driving Bly the half hour from Tacoma to Sea-Tac Airport when he asked what I was working on. I replied Origin of the Valentine, a book of poems about well-known women, each in dramatic confrontation with a male. Bly asked me to recite one. He was aghast, flashing a huge Freudian nightmare. The dark hole full of bugs, surrounded by vines, was vagina, that clutched lumpy bag, castrated testicles. Bly saw a horrid triumphant Medusa, poetry too intimate and invasive of non-posthumous personal character. He warned me how dangerous my project was—on the level of black magic—and demanded several times, “Don’t write one about me.” All that fun I had with the poem just made it more luridly terrifying to Bly, our contemporary poet champion of fairy tales and mythos.

I have found that any story with great particulars gives auto-manifestation of the archetypes, the pure foundation of fairytale, myth, my own life, and my poetry. All I have to do—more often than not, hard and longtime labor—is get the surface detail of the story as specific and concrete as possible, and the archetypal underworld surges up to meet it. I must set a foot in temporality—this mortal world of particulars that it is my job to present—and the other in eternity—that force world of the Muse and all archetypes—eager to meet me if I open.

ORSON: Is that how you got the finale? Mine eyes dazzle. All your poems have such a sense of ending as you avoid what is usual to go off just right. I’ll mention that your poem “What Is Sleep” flourishes so wonderfully. I know you work your poems for years. So what can you tell us about how you finish . . . when and why you are satisfied a poem does what you want it to do?

DB: While I was working out the details of this yearly drama between the wild-haired woman and well repairman, I flashed a factual phenomenon heard as child, that from deep in a well, you can see stars in daytime. By having our repairman bonk his head—which doubles the layers of stars—I put him into a dazed, alternate dimension of perception, and with him take the reader right out into eternity, where the confused woman and the dazed man are looking to each other across vastness, unable to clearly see, hear, or connect. This cosmic joke seemed emblematic of the comic male-female difficulty these two caricatures play out down in the carnal bean yard.

What I want a poem to do is not the secret. What does the poem want to do is what I must open to. Then the Muse will meet me with all her force. If I try to invent, to think up poetry out of my head, I will get Dracula watching old Dracula movies, the zombie art of our cerebral faculties endlessly looping their own obsessed synapses without any greater spark of true life, which jolts from a far deeper jugular. It is my function as poet, not to think up information or ideas, but to get the down-and-dirty details exact, tell the story in all its color, with all its sound, and while doing so discover what archetypes are present, for all of us, not by explaining or philosophizing them but by sharpening the detail, images, and sound that carry them. My job is to be receptive and to do the grunt work. The Muse—co-creator with me—breathes inspirational hints and clues into my receptivity. The grunt work consists of sorting out which are the gift bits from the god and which are my own ordinary head babble. What I am supposed to do is recognize and follow the true clues while jettisoning what is my own mere pedestrian invention. Thus step by step, clue by clue, revision by revision, gallop by gallop, I am following where the poem wants to go. The poem is wilder and wiser than I. I am thus coming upon the poem, not inventing or self-creating it, though it does take a poor dumb mortal like me to ride it into manifestation. So the Muse needs me too.

ORSON: And what does our lady have you working on now?

DB: Ahhh, the Robert Bly question. A quarter of a century later, I’m still laboring those Origin of the Valentine poems that he asked me to recite from. The first—Marge Piercy and the well repairman—is finished. The second—Diane Wakoski and the hitchhiker—is so close to finished. The third—Charleen Swansea and the brother—is finished. And the next five are underway, have been for over 25 years. I hope to finish at least two or three more before I am tramped into this earth. And of course I am also working on other poems started five, ten, twenty years ago.

ORSON: How can we keep up with what you are doing? Periodic cheery galumphs to Bisbee?

DB: You may not want to do that. I haven’t told you that this ten-poem sequence is a journey through Hell and out the other side. “The Black-Ratsnake Ritual” is its symbolic beginning—that descent down into darkness. It is innocent enough, with its comedy and good nature, that an audience might elect to join the damnable ride, rather than hang back like Bly. The second poem, “Hitchhiking on Halloween,” spills all critters, varmints, ghouls up out of the depths onto this plane at midnight, with as much caricature as the first poem, but far less humor. The third poem, “Three Snapshots Thirty Years Old,” is gut-punch sexless rape of a pubescent child by male ego—the under-darkness loose here in broad day of ordinary life. And the poems just go more and more horrific after that, until the last few gradually drop us on out the other side of Hell exhausted of torture and terror.

So Bly was onto something, though I’m not sure he stated it correctly. My own life was certainly going to Hell at the time. The third great romance of my heart had just imploded. And I’d taken that glorious old nosedive into a psychic black hole. These poems—each colliding a celebrated female with some archetypal male—were coming to me one after another. I knew they paralleled my own psychic predicament. I knew to come out the other side I had to plummet the flames of Hell. I felt it my job to manifest these poems to play out a full-hearted plunge and survival.

ORSON: Whoa! do you mean—

DB: Yes. I claimed earlier, archetype is foundation of fairytale, myth, my own life, and my poetry, that if I get surface detail of a drama particularized just so, fully concrete, an archetypal underworld surges up to meet it—and in this case, met me, my own life opera, my poetry so ferociously. But I have proof. I can document that such so-called pathetic fallacy actually occurred.

I was finally off the road—where most of these Origin of the Valentine poems were inspired—and living back in Portland, Oregon, where the poems, this whole project, the Hellish journey of my own failed life and loves, the magma within Mount St. Helens were welling up beyond the measly power of the Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima. I was on the wildest ride of my life, with the shakes, big flashback visions, unfathomable sobs, increasing breakdowns, rumblings from the deep earth bearing up that mountain only 50 miles away. I sat with Carolyn Forché in my car outside a party during one rain of ash, asking how to redirect an unworthy life into committed poetry, while the windshield dirtied over. I broke in half during a tremor, standing upon my bed weeping “The Bleeding” too loud while friends downstairs suffered me and my poem along with the quake. O I crumpled completely. Then miraculously I stood high upon a roof almost in the plume, chest booming that May 18, 1980, force of 500 atomic bombs.

Somehow I knew, as post-eruptions continued, that my own life story and its ritualistic poems—a set of ten in the tradition of Rainier Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares—were in synchronicity with upsurges of headless St. Helens. My own psychic and bodily throbs and throes were biofeedback instrument more trusty than seismographic squiggles. So I slammed the whole psychotic marvel into 25 copies of a 24-page Xerox booklet—True History of the Eruption—along with prediction of an ensuing big St. Helens eruption, all raving writing-pasteup-stapling Hiroshima night, and by dawn August 7, 1980, dropped them at the downtown post office, addressed to Robert Bly—I think—and 24 others, including myself, so the day’s postmark would punch them with time and place just before explosion. Then I crashed.

I woke late afternoon to cries from the street down below my open windows. St. Helens was exploding ash eight miles into the sky—yes! hours and hours. This is all documented in the 25 postmarked copies of True History and Martha Bergman’s review of that book on 91 Northwest over KKSN-AM 910 from Portland on August 28, 1980. I possess a cassette of her broadcast.

Two months later as I drove south out of Portland to save my heart and mind and life, all my clothes and manuscripts jammed into my Volkswagen, everything other abandoned behind, I could hear reports on the FM that the mountain was going off again and again. In San Francisco the next mornings I was the one who knew what that was rained down all over our cars. As I continued looking for a home in the Southwest, where I’d never been, through Colorado, New Mexico, west Texas, I kept hearing staticky radio reports of the shaking volcano. On that day I arrived in Bisbee from El Paso—November 20, 1980—she ba-roomed a finale violent spew—for a couple years anyway—possibly as I sat down into this very chair at the Copper Queen Saloon.

ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight. Anything you would care to add?

DB: That I twitch their echo. Each bewitching hour. But poetry is not black magic. It is also not pretty little moments apart from all the horrors of reality. Never forget that our winged steed of poetry sprang from spurting Medusa after Perseus scythed her snake-writhing head off. Poseidon fathered Pegasus on a Gorgon so ugly and fearsome that just a glance at her would jolt you to stone. That white ride so beloved of the Muses, with moon-shaped hooves releasing inspiriting fountains wherever they struck earth, was mothered by the most terrifying face in all history.

Thus you may want to ask yourself why, what this might possibly mean about poetry. Or you may, like me, just accept that poetry and its Muse are paradoxically fused with the worst ferocity imaginable. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright / in the forests of the night.” It is in such night, especially now at blackest hour, that our stars burn brightest.

And surely I should say—Pegasus was the constellation just breaking that Big Sky horizon the moment I was birthed back there in Montana 1941 wild ride country.



Dick Bakken, Copper Queen Hotel Saloon veranda, June 25, 1989, the 113th
anniversary of the slaughter of Custer and 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn in
Montana. Photos by Swiss photographer Andreas Rentsch.


Dick Bakken found his voice while living in Portland, Oregon, during the Summer of Love, 1967. Three years later—in the storm of Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State—he resigned his tenured professorship at Portland State University with an incendiary poem on the official form, featured in his latest book, Dick Bakken: Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, 2005). Hits is available for $8.95 + $1.50 postage from www.puddinghouse.com in Columbus, Ohio, or for $10.00 postpaid and signed from the author at dickbakken@yahoo.com. From 1997 to 2000 Dick wrote a weekly poetry column, “Ink that Echoes,” for the Bisbee News, serving 17,500 readers in Cochise County, Arizona, where he has lived right on the Mexican border since the end of 1980. There he issued an audio stereo cassette, The Other Side: Dick Bakken Live / Selected Voicings 1978–84, (Brushfire Publications, 1986), available signed from the author postpaid for $10.00.

My Interview With Orson...Blue Tattoo (Tammy Turner Peaden)

My Interview With Orson...Blue Tattoo

---

Orson: “No one in film has ever had such talent, such energy, such innate depth. But he had made a film that ensured his career’s end, and he had done it all so that the films grim portrait of solitude would be fulfilled.”

Hello, this is Orson Welles. I was just reading one of my many biographies. Really… I don’t know if I believe that last sentence.

In any case…

(MUSIC: SPANISH THEME SONG ["NO MORE," A TANGO].. FADES)

Orson: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small, spinning fragment of solar driftwood which, by chance or design, man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.

Which reminds me that we are here tonight to discuss poetry. Blue Tattoo, welcome.

Blue Tattoo (BT): Thank you, Mr. Welles. It's my great pleasure to be here.

Orson: Let me start with this poem.

What Frank Knew

She pauses on the rim
of the sleeping desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond

and suddenly she's Ava,
backwoods beauty stolen
from an old movie, playing
a sultry scene in sweat-wet khaki
beneath a California moon,
swaying to forgotten strains

of silent music that tickles
my memory, tighten my senses
and now she turns-
turning to smile at me dark-haired
and dangerous and all at once
I recognize the pull, fall

under the hard draw
of a sucking tide and I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot and
I understand, same as Frank did,
the nature of certain addictions.



Let me tell you – this is perfect of its kind. Wonderful. How did you come to write it?

BT: Well, Mr. Welles, this poem is actually rooted in fact. Even though I reside nowhere near a desert, sleeping or otherwise, there IS a vacant lot behind the hospital I frequent that could pass for a desert; especially now that the streetlights that face it have been broken out and it's been put in the dark. Unless, of course, there's a moon hanging around...but, back to the facts. There's this ER doc that I was spooning a while ago, even though such pairings are strictly frowned upon (I'm a Paramedic, and we are NOT supposed to fraternize with the higher-ups), but I became enamored, actually, addicted is a much more apt term, and I managed to talk her into a couple or three smoke breaks in the aforementioned vacant lot. She carried pack matches from the commissary, and smoked Luckies, but the Blue Diamonds were easy enough to imagine...and my pop smoked Sweet Caporals; I still remember the heavy smell of them. This particular doc had long, very brunette hair and hooded eyes, and being from Mississippi, a drawl that could melt butter. Being a HUGE Ava fan (those lips, those ELBOWS), all it took was a strike and a turn.

Orson: I knew Ava, of course. Did you know that Rita Hayworth and I planned to build right there at Nepenthe down Highway 1 from Carmel? I mention this because, under the aspect of Eternity I saw, perhaps two of your mortal years ago, two of the fellows who are here at the Jeunesse Doree as they sat on the deck of the restaurant “Nepenthe” sipping fine ale and always reflecting on that name as great crows or ravens harried them trying to catch their attention just long enough to signify something. The crows or ravens failed. Instead they persisted in laughing over their own limericks. They were the Lonliest Ranger and Samson Shillitoe and Mr. Shillitoe, when you posted this poem a few days ago, gave the right and inevitable reaction.

I couldn’t have said it better. But (and I hope you agree with what Samson wrote) and looking at poem yourself…how do you think it works in this way, what happens in the poem to do just what Samson says it does? And please remember to not let modesty restrain you. The poem is there.

BT: Nepenthe...I know it well. The opiate's dream, Homer's remedy for grief; mecca of poets, artists, and vagabonds. Carved right out of the cliffs, isn't it? Lovely place, smelling of salt and redwood and oak. I have a friend who lives in Esalen; I visited the Henry Miller museum once. And of course, there is Big Sur; which I think has become woefully...well, commercialized. Full of re-habitants. I agree that the restaurant is a wonder; I had an ambrosia burger there in '74, back when I was younger and had a little change to spend. Their merlot is excellent, if I recall correctly.
But I do run on...back to your question. I was honored by Mr. Shilitoe's response, thrilled, actually. For me, it was that turning...it really DID push the sun away (had there been one; there wasn't). When she turned, her hands cupped around her match, it lit her face from beneath her chin; it pulled her aspect into something breathtaking...I hate that word, but in this case, it's apropos...and pulled me with it. That's the moment that my 'addiction' to this woman began; I could'nt get enough. Ava came almost immediately to mind; particularly Mogambo, which I had seen just the night before. What I think happens in this poem is strictly animal; that guttural attraction that can occur at certain moments, welcome or no. It's sensory, olfactory, visceral. Ask Frank, he'll tell you.

Orson: Look at the transition from the first to the second verse:

She pauses on the rim
of the sleeping desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond

and suddenly she's Ava,

What a wonderful effect. Of a sudden the flame..and what I love about it is just how cinematic it is. The poem is incredibly visual with of course just what is also there in my movies: light and shadow and then blue diamond which is hot damn just what is needed as a star is born. What I mean is… you have a scene and somehow there is so much more there: the fineness of, of course, just that sort of cigarette, the scene sketched as if seen from some starry perspective as she pauses on the rim of the desert, the close up of the “boot-struck” match, the exact sense of the shadow with all of its implications and then that blue diamond (Blue Diamond matches, of course but the twin senses of star) and then the poem illuminated by a suddenness as the unnamed “she” becomes Ava – the humor and the throat catching revelation of the goddess all at once.

Yes. If you can… would you tell us what you think was happening just then when you wrote those lines?

BT: I can tell you exactly what was happening; again with the turning, the hooding of that face that by now, wasn't the doc's face at all...it was Ava. It physically tugged the muscles in my belly, made me as light-headed as a good dose of opium. I was literally 'rendered speechless'...I remember dropping my own smoke and how throaty her laughter was when she noticed my awkward behavior. I was instantly in love...an emotion uncommon to me...and though it faded as soon as the sodium lights of the parking lot hit us; l can still remember that turning....

I could spend the rest of our interview on this poem. Look …just this:

…I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot

with its perfect use of “sluiced with the exact shadowings and then the startling effect of “perfect” throat and the hammering of perfect yet again…

So, it’s inevitable… I want to know who you are. Who are you? Please feel free to make anything up. I did. It’s a mark of greatness. Although at times it did seem as if I really had been a bullfighter in Spain at 15.

BT: Who am I? Now there's a question. I guess, to quote a sailor man, I am what I am. I'm female, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool dyke, I abhor all those 'lipstick lezzies' that always smell like bubblegum. I ran away from my oh-so-genteel southern folks at 15 and joined the armed forces as a medic; in those days, women stayed pretty much in the MASH tents with little sight of actual combat...but I managed to land a gig on a medivac as a flight nurse. I miss it. My family disowned me when they found out I was gay; I was likewise excommunicated from their Catholic church; a thing I find really amusing in light of today's rampant collarly pedophilia.
I became a paramedic because I'm a trauma junkie; I live in a redneck, backwards town in the dismal swamps of Carolina, and I own three blue-tic hounds and a red-bone yard dog. I live alone, I hunt to relax, and I find censorship a crime punishable by death. My favorite album (yes, album) is Holiday's 'Jazz 'round midnight', and I'm secretly in love with Lenny Bruce. I'm a morphine junkie but I'm trying to quit...and I love chocolate necco wafers. And I write because I can't NOT write...if that makes sense to anyone but me.

Orson: May we discuss this poem?

Blue on Blue

3:16 AM, emergency entrance, county general-
I was propped against the rear doors of a rig
parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke
with cigarettes tucked behind their palms,
furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don't-do-that sign
while people shift back and forth around them
and I was thinking about this tweaker kid
we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault,
his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots

I was thinking about how he wouldn't
stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy
dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves

I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt
sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees,
how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream

I was thinking about how an intern
with two silver loops in his ear hummed 'Blue on Blue'
under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse

I thought about these things
I watched the guards watch me
I didn't clean any secrets from the rig
I did sit down on the step plate
I picked at the wick of my zippo
I whistled the intern's song

somewhere behind me
a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb
pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt.



Orson: So, I’m thinking that this poem is a poem about something that actually happened, or something written from this and that that actually happened. True?
Can you tell us about it? And what is a “tweaker?”

BT: Yes, it's true...this was an actual event. Just one of the many tweakers I pick up in the course of a shift; a tweaker being a methamphetamine addict. Meth labs are a HUGE problem in my area. This particular kid was about seventeen; he was cranked up on his buy and got himself run over by a car while attempting to cross a major highway. He was a mess, never had a chance; but we worked out on him anyway. The memory of that scene that is most clear was the girl; I happened to look up as my partner pulled away and she was sitting just like that on the curb. It struck me as inevitably sad. He would'nt die, never lost his rhythm while I had him...and he should have. He died later in the OR. The nurse whistled the entire time I was trying to give my report; he really did'nt give a shit and I was bothered that I did. I can't listen to 'Blue on Blue' anymore without thinking about that girl sitting on that curb; and sometimes I find myself humming it at inopportune moments. Funny, the things that stick.

Orson: It’s a fine poem. May we, for an instant, move away from the poem just there to where the poem came from? What I mean is this…every time I read poems by a certain sort of true poet (more or less every poet who remains somewhat within my ken…unlike Shakespeare or Dante for example who seem to create as God and who am I to try to
describe the universe?) I feel there are certain pressures or let’s say wants behind the poem…and I wish I could name them. What do you want your poems to do? What yearning is behind them? Or…what dark materials?

BT: I guess, Mr. Welles, I just want my poems to remember, to serve as some sort of marker for a whole lot of things I can't forget. It's nothing I can really pin down, and after all my years of sitting up with the dead, I find myself mostly numb. But every once in a while, a thing will jar me...like the girl on the curb. She was nothing; just another crack ho who's probably dead now herself, but in that frozen instant she was something indefinable, something incredibly important if only to me and the dead boy; something worthy of note. So I did, note it, that is...and I guess that's all I want my poems to do, just remember what most folks forget. The materials are nothing more than my life...I write only what I know.

Orson: Maybe this is the same as the question I just asked. What would you want your poetry to do that it doesn’t do? Which of your poems come closest to doing what you would like?

BT: Lets see...I would like my poems to be taken seriously. Let me explain that; almost everyone who reads my stuff dismisses it as 'shock' trash, poetry that's meant to awe people simply by way of the language I use and the subject matter entailed. But I don't do it on purpose; what most people never take the time to find out is that the language is MY language; the subjects are MY experiences; and it is troublesome to me when it's dismissed as nothing more than words meant to elicit response by some deliberate use of certain words and scenes. Maybe that's sort of vain, but it's a worry spot. My very favorite poem of my own (and I don't have many) has to be 'View From A Flying Jimmy'. It's the one that outlines the start of my every workday in precise and exact detail. It's almost like a diary entry...and because of that, I like it best.


Orson: Here’s another fine poem:

Olongapo Night

She lay still, taut on the bed,
and watched as a fat spider
with spindly legs like eyelashes,
danced at the end of an unseen line.

It hung from a topmost corner
of the raftered ceiling,
its slight, somehow lewd sway
cast eerie marionette shadows
that grew long and slunk away
along the muted eggshell walls.

She pulled the thin cover to her chin,
stared at it frightened, yet seduced.
A chill like a creeping fog spread through
the walls of her belly in thick layers.

The spider swung itself upon a beam,
and perched in an awful, knowing attitude.
It regarded her in silent anticipation,
seemed to wave in secret conspiracy.
It skittered in sudden decision across the wood,
then vanished off the edge of her perception.

She thought without effort of the Buso,
Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,
and waited in puddles of cold sweat
for the sweet feast to begin.


Dear God, don’t you wish that the hypothetical intelligent reader were not hypothetical?.
Who has read this – did anyone ever tell you that they knew where Olongapo is or what the Buso or “Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,” are?

BT: HaHa!! Almost everyone who has ever commented on this poem hates it. I've been told it doesn't ring true, that it's a made-up place, that it's all just fairy tale bullshit. One guy over at PFFA told me that it was long on adjectives and horribly short on form, whatever the hell THAT meant. The actual root of this piece is simple: my father was in the navy during WWII, and fought in the pacific theatre during the battle of Leyte. He was there when Mac Arthur announced "All the phillipines are now liberated". He spent many nights in the city of olongapo. He fell quite in love with the country as well as a Filipina girl named Corazon. When I became an adult and could wrap an adult's mind around his stories that I remembered from my childhood, I understood that had he been born in today's time, he would have left his family for his 'heart'; the phillipines and his much-lamented Corazon. It was from him that I learned of these quite nasty Filipino folk tales, he liked to scare the shit out of me with horrible visions of this flesh-eating monster when I was around eight...and this poem is kind of autobiographical; the girl in the piece is me.

Orson: Olongapo:

“They were the clubs and various entertainment-oriented businesses which welcomed American sailors and Marines to Olongapo City, Philippines. Despite the Navy's dire attempts at "OPSEC," every Filipina in every club and bar knew just when American naval vessels were due to arrive at the adjacent Subic Bay Naval Base. Banners hung over every club entrance with such greetings as "Welcome USS Pelilieu," "Welcome sailors and Marines, USS Blue Ridge."

A visit to Olongapo was special in many ways. To the sailors and Marines not stationed at Subic, it was a chance to get the hell off a ship, into some civies, and into the most exciting town in the Orient. For newbies, this was their chance to experience what had become legendary - a night in Olongapo. For returnees, it was an opportunity to visit old haunts and look for old friends (yes, usually Filipinas). For the bar owners it meant money, and lots of it. And for the Filipinas employed at the various clubs it meant not only income, but often the chance to meet the right guy and, if they were so disposed, to start the move eastward.

There was nothing quite like the excitement servicemen felt at liberty call the first night in Subic. While a few unlucky guys got stuck with Shore Patrol or some other duty, most of the sailors and Marines waited anxiously in line aboard ship for liberty to be sounded. When it happened, hundreds of hungry, thirsty, and incredibly bored men shot off the ship and toward the main gate.

Even before the servicemen made it off the base, Olongapo made its presence known by booming rock music over the gates. Even those new to the base were able to find the front gate by following the thunderous bass radiated by the nearby Playboy and Hot Lips clubs.

Once you made it past the guards at the front gate, you crossed a bridge which spanned a river known simply as the "Shit River." Not a pleasant name, but fairly appropriate given that raw sewage from the town was often dumped into it. Boys in little, flimsy boats beckoned from below the bridge, telling passers-by to throw pesos or centavos into the river. When a coin did get thrown, the boys would dive into the filth and somehow retrieve the coin. The navy eventually tried to discourage this practice by putting a fence along one side of the bridge.”

Does this sort of thing never end?

Now let’s see what else:

“Mananangal – The most feared Filipino creature; also known as wak-wak in the Bisayan dialect. Common people believe the wak-wak is always a woman. Between six or seven o’clock at night this creature finds a secret place near her home. She bends her body down while her legs remain rigid and straight; her hair becomes stiff and nails turn into long sharp claws; her eyes grow bigger and eerily glows; while large bat-like wings protrude from her body echoing the sound “wak-wak-wak” as it flies along. It preys on the livers of the sick and disobedient children who refuse to come indoors at twilight. They are especially fond of developing babies in their mother’s womb; whose blood is sucked by using its tongue as a threadlike proboscis which enters through the mother’s navel. Vigilant eyes, garlic and a pair of scissors or thorny branches should be kept beside a pregnant woman at all times. “

and the Buso another kind of monster.

I love this poem and now it might be illuminated somewhat. The girl waits for the monsters – who is she…just that Filipina who will be used in the usual ways by the usual monsters..

Did you ever explain this poem to anyone?


BT: I tried to explain to the idiot at PFFA, but he was'nt listening. No one else has ever asked for explanation; they have all simply dismissed it as a worthless crock of over-done imagery. I am very pleased, Mr. Welles, that you know of such places and things.


Orson: Damn that was fun. And what a poem…really. The descriptions exact and, again, shadowing so much.

So, let me close with this. Last of all, is there anything you would like to add?

BT: Yes, Mr. Welles, as a matter of fact there is. I would like to add that I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with you, and it has been my honor to have been the subject of your interest. May I request a tune of the orchestra? Please have them play 'La Comparista'...it reminds me of the wonderful Meridian Room where I first tasted champagne. Good night and adieu, Mr. Welles; and thank you for our time together.

Orson: And now this. As an immortal spirit I charge you to keep writing.
Starry night and you alive alive oh. Until we meet again.

Goodnight America.

In a few moments we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey.

We return you until then to the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.
(MUSIC: "STARDUST" PLAYS FOR A WHILE, THEN QUICKLY FADES OUT )

We are ready now to take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton where Carl Phillips, our commentator, will interview Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer. We take you now to Princeton, New Jersey.
(ECHO CHAMBER. SOUND OF TICKING CLOCK.)

Orson Welles/Joe Green

Orson Welles/Joe Green

---

ANNOUNCER
Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of
these broadcasts, Orson Welles.

ORSON WELLES: Hello, the Jeunesse Doree and all the ships at sea and
in the maelstromed starry welkin!

This is ORSON WELLES.

Our interview tonight is with Joe Green, poet and Shakespearean
scholar. On this particular evening the Crosley service estimates that
thirty-seven billion creatures, mortal and immortal, are listening to
us on their Zenith Trans-Cosmic radios. Ratings are up, I see.

Before we begin the interview
Here’s a word from our sponsor: the Jeunesse Doree!

THE LONLIEST RANGER: Hello, this is the Lonliest Ranger and welcometo the fourth in the series of blithe interviews conducted by Orson Welles– discarnate spirit, creator of Citizen Kane, the best movie even made, reader for "The March of Time" news series, and the famed first voice
of "The Shadow" in the celebrated crime series, and of course, Harry
Lyme, The Third Man.

ORSON WELLES: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The
Shadow knows!” But, as always, no one else cares. Alas.

The LONLIEST RANGER: Thank you Mr. Welles. Tonight we have a show I think you will enjoy. Poet and great actor/artist sit before the fire in the reconstructed redwood cabin nestled deep in the Carmel Valley
hills under the famous Owl Oak, orgiastic abode of the muse. Outside
an ill wind is blowing nobody good, but herein, where warmth an
camaraderie hold sway along with John Powers and Johnny Walker, we are
blessed with anticipatory frissions and make no bones about it. So
make yourself comfortable with your favorite psychic aid and be
prepared to be amazed.


While we are waiting. Let me ask you this. Is the same old horse
shit getting you down? Are the nattering nabobs of the internet eroding
your finely tuned senses and turning your ear to tin? Are you ready to
rediscover the joy and pathos of the ethereal riff, to pluck the bon
mot from the hands of the goddess herself? If so, you owe it to
yourself to join us here, at this hallowed sad but merry museoreum, the
Juenesse Doree of the Forbidden Story.

I, the Lonliest Ranger, Black Irish Catholic Jew, resplendent in my
buckskins and silver, stand like Lady Liberty herself, my six shooter
held high and say to you as she would, "Welcome!" Here, we eats cold
eels and think distant thoughts. Perhaps you could too. Complimentary
champagne for our new members!

And now… Mr. Orson Welles!

ORSON: Thank, you Lonliest. Mr. Green, or should I refer to you by
another of your many monikers? Joe?

JG: Joe. Just Joe.

ORSON: Kevin Killian wrote: "Joe Green’s poetry has a savage wit anda plaintive, enchanting innocence, like some of Joe Brainard’s drawings."

Who is Joe Brainard?

JG: See here www.joebrainard.org/

Some nut.

ORSON: You've had an interesting life haven't you? I wonder if you could tell us a bit about those experiences that
most shaped your weltanschauung? Who were your formative influences and
why?

JG: I went to Catholic schools in a doomed mill town that was haunted and at the same time I had access through books and, heartbreakingly, mostly through insights arrived at too late into supernal beauty. At six, my first day at St. Cecilia's I asked "Who signed me up for this?" We were mostly doomed and had no idea what to do about it but there were moments of grace and immortal spirits in the "wanting them to be immortal spirits sense" who now exist in my memory. I want them to be remembered in my poesy but mostly can't even get close to what I would like to do. Only a few somehow exist as more than markers for a certain sense of rage and bafflement that my poesy now and then is lucky enough to express. I got out of there -- the US Army took me away. Man.

I was reading Spinoza at ten. Absolutely true. Of course, I didn't understand a damn thing but the point was something else. Somehow -- please tell me if I am wrong here Orson -- I got the idea there was a class system here in the good old USA and that the place was run mostly by madmen who contrived to also be very boring. Also I got the idea that they owned me. But I had nary an inkling that I could in fact ever know just how they got me or what I could do about it. The bigotry of low expectations. I also somehow developed a complete indifference to and a lack of interest in getting along -- although I got along in the sense that I am still here. Most anyone I knew from there who had anything like an inkling to escape were ruined in all the usual ways. Escaped to the Army and death, drugs...blah blah. I knew a man -- a boy ok -- for example who was a good artist. But -- just incidentally believed he just might be John Lennon who went to NYC to become a junkie and then while finding refuge on various street corners stayed awake nights as much as he could drawing miniature street scenes on cardboard (scenes oh you have never seen) and somehow recovered enough to bring it all back home. Where arrested and taken to the local prison promised he would escape -- beaten still made that promise, beaten more (and I have this account from others there -- others whom I met ten years ago and almost passed in the street since who knew that the bums with no teeth were my old friends) just laughed. "You assholes, " he said. "Can't you tell I'm kidding?"

That's poetry by the way.

They all laughed about it and then went into a long riff about how there aren't any cops around like the old cops and how much they missed them. So, Kevin got out and somehow stopped shooting heroin (is that phrase antiquated?) and kept drawing and who knows if he finally stopped but died. Not before someone noticed those drawings and in time for a "show" at a shippier town and another friend a few years ago called up and told me "We lost Kevin" and this struck me as such an odd want to be genteel and lost way to put it and this phrase came back to me as I in a half hour and just about this time last year wrote a poem on my father's dying.

Last Night

Last night I was watching 'Panic in Needle Park"
1971 with Al Pacino playing a junkie
And what’s her name Kitty Winn playing his girlfriend
A sweet girl but then, inevitably, a junkie and then a whore.
He betrays her and then she turns him in when she gets in trouble.
Nothing personal really and when he gets out of jail
And sees her... a perfect ending. He says "You comin?"
Junkies in New York. I knew this one and that one.
All dead now and I remember John calling me
"I have bad news we lost Kevin." "Lost?"
This one and that one and I would remember if I could.
But instead I feel desperate for 1971 to see what's left
What will be left which is a certain slur of colors
There out on the streets and this is what will be left:
The movie. Need a dime to make a call. Yes.
The VW the narcs drive now looking so strange.
But at the end a slur of color. And I am grateful even for this.

Today my father is dying. Went in won't come out.
"Failure to thrive" Which means he won't eat. Doesn't want to eat.
Just two weeks ago not all there then he still
Asked me if I could go home and get his razor.
The good one. And pointed at the tree outside his window.
And said something. But now my brother says even
That whatever is gone him gone except for the part
That worries about how he's going to pay for all this.
Which I am grateful for. I remember the old lady
in the Williams' poem on her last ride seeing trees
A blur asking "What are those?" "Trees"
"I'm tired of them too." So much is left behind.

Which is the easy thing to say but not right.
Or at least you know that this one and that one
Is gone and there was a certain look.
Tired then I remember of the bullshit of, for example, war
And then tired of the bullshit about the bullshit of war
And then not even tired or now so what but
I would remember if I could. I'd remember my father if I could.
2AM stomach pains. He called my brother to take him.
Chinese doctor in the emergency room and my father asks
"Are you Jewish?" The doctor laughs. And my father says.
"Why are you laughing? It's not funny. I need a professional here."


That particular poem is invulnerable. (and later on we can discuss how annoying claims like this made by me are) and the wanting that is there and the bitterness and the joking is, for example, illustrated in the prison anecdote before it.

But my way out(although I never got out) was books. Contrast me, Orson, with Samson who at the age of 17 heard a neighbor playing a flamenco record said yes and was on his way to Spain in an instant to learn to do just that. What a moron I was. I remember riding on a train to Philly seeing some cadets from Valley Forge Military Academy (exactly where Holden Caulfield escaped from) and longing to, at least, even be there. But -- books and so years of bellycrawling through stacks in libraries and somehow still back in Warrensville that was enough since I was cursed with an imagination that monstered everything there with significance and a sense of the transcendent.
In other words early on I stopped looking at the usual reality and made up my own movie. Is this a bad thing? You would know.


But I had all those books and let's be honest here. By the time I was 17 I had read -- with a bit of the right sort of attention -- most of the deathless poesy in English and there was bliss and I always had that and withal always had an unfortunate but needed distance from this our vale of tears. And then -- being asked to leave a certain Jesuit university -- I was lucky enough to be enrolled in Lincoln University where I was taught English Lit the good old way and loved it. All professors there being odd fellows and exiles. And then -- lets pass years and years -- I was damn lucky to do a doctoral program at the place where Berryman jumped -- professors my friends equally in love with all that is there. The tales I could tell. And in any case -- although practical success doomed – there was a sense of the sacredness and absolute importance of scholarship (as in getting off your lazy ass and discovering something other than yourself and wanting truth) that was deepened which, along with a contempt for the pretense that kills that I got from growing up peculiar in a doomed mill town and a healthy hatred of systems of oppression embodied by the trivial and designed to protect them has brought me to your attention -- perhaps the greatest artistic failure of the 20th century though you be imaginary and tra la la to that. As you understand.




ORSON: Of course. We'll skip over the rest I guess. The railroads, the Asian nights, the semi-furnished rooms, the carnival. What would you say your primary motivators are now at nearly 57 years of age?

JG:I don't know. I have always been desperate and confused and expect to continue being desperate and confused. No doubt and if I am lucky all will be revealed a moment or two before death. I am not a knower of myself or, perhaps, don't want to know. Of course I am desperate to stop time or, if that concession can't be made, to have enough time. Really, it's all in "The Tempest" although I would like my wife along with my daughter on that island along with a few boon companions. My wife and daughter would have no problems with Caliban -- both know much more than I ever will. So, no problem there...and I could fiddle about as I do and everyone would be safe.

But that won't happen.

I'll probably muddle along pretending it has. Anent poetry -- it would be nice to have it occur as it once occurred.

And I would like a cabin in a bee loud glade -- a great advantage there in Innisfree is that one can at times escape from the constant knowledge that one has to go through all these things twice. Samson is also a fellow of a certain age and knows what I mean.

No place for bad art in any case.


ORSON: Now I know you've been recently translated into Russian and
that the prestigious if impecunious poet's at Fulcrum magazine admire
your work. But lets begin with something from your past, The Insect
Clerks of Neiman Marcus. Here is a recording from your original
Parapark Tapes with Samson Shillitoe, whom we hope to have visit us
here one day.

The Insect Clerks of Neiman Marcus

Lo! The Gods and Goddesses of the new mythology.
The Godesses are crocodiles in communion dresses!
They wear Adolf of Dachau designer jeans!
They wear necklaces of bird skeletons!
The Gods wear shrouds of petroleum jelly!
They brilliantine their hair.
They turn their mild, Belsen eyes on you
"May I help you sir?" O do not stare!
At secret luncheons they devour lark's hearts.
They devour the intestines of mummys.
They prefer larks three to one.
Three to one.
They have never murdered a baby
Who didn't deserve it.

Listen O listen!
Hear the twitching of their delicate attennae!
Haie! They come! They come!
Dragging their long
and swelling abdomens!

The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!

Beware their dread ovipositors!
Beware their dread ovipositors!
Beware their dread ovipositors!

The insect clerks have come.

There are trapdoors in Cosmetics!
There are trapdoors in Lingerie!
There are trapdoors in Men's Accessories!
There is a secret button in the elevator.

Nightly they descend into vast catacombs.
Buffy! Meagan! Tom! Wesley!
They hang upside down!
They copulate like bats!
They whisper to each others in the languages
Of prehistoric fungi!
And, like Gods everywhere,
They are always hungry.

O Holy Mother!
The store is closing!
They know who you are!
Run! O RUN!

There is a trapdoor in Customer Service.

Down you go
down
down
down
They carry you effortlessly through the tunnels.

They carry you past rooms.
Rooms where small blue clouds weep!
Rooms full of angel guts!
Rooms full of bearded foetuses in bronze caskets.
Rooms where your wife makes love to eels!
(Your wife has a certain eel sex appeal)
Rooms where sores run naked on chandeliers!
Rooms where sewage rats read poetry
In pink peignoirs!

O what is this big room?
It is the Mad Queen's chamber.
It is the throneroom of hearts.
It looks. It looks.
The inside of your brain.

The indifferent mandibles let you drop
To the marble floor.


They quietly suck out your eyes.
And then
Ah! Then!
The Mad Queen comes.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

The dread ovipositer.

You lay paralyzed.

You look out into the "Crevices of Night."

After 80,000 years
your tears
turn to pearls.

Oh, those were pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him but doth suffer…

Just remarkable, Mr. Green. I invited C.G. Jung to join us to discuss
this seminal work, but he was unable, being called away to answer
Freud's claim that he was a mere occultist. Please sir, what is this
'new mythology' of which you speak and how does the poem embody it?


JG: I have no idea, Orson. A vile paraphrase ( and there's no avoiding that) would say this and that but really what happens is that everything happens at once and that phrase allows or creates or whatever the "small, blue clouds" weeping or the "indifferent mandibles" and the rest and there is nothing like it. Really. I know. It has a certain comic sense that is unique, its a hell of a lot of fun to read aloud and I had a hell of a lot of fun doing so while Samson does just what is right with the bongos and we are back in that cabin at Owl Oak having a lot of fun. It's a kind of instance, a flash of merriment with withal sadness and wanting. It is just the sort of poem that unintelligent fellows who have no sense of poetry abhor as they drone on about surrealism or abhor the Beat Poets or natter on about nothing at all and so voila it is all about them. Damn Insect Clerks.

I noticed that when I said "I know" there was flash of merriment on your own immortal features. I suppose this is one of my many irritating qualities. That is, I know what a good poem is. It doesn't matter at all to me whether I write it or someone else just because it seems very odd in the most important way to even talk about an "I." Anyone who has ever written a good poem is completely unable to tell you how the poem was made. How could they -- they have no damn idea. Too bad. So, occasionally, damn you, someone comes along who gets lucky once in a while a writes a good poem (not a great one) and can tell when a poem works and when it doesn't and is, yes, right.

Doesn't happen that often and it is a curse. The poor fellow cursed this way is doomed to exile. Exactly because he also sees how damn dull most "poetry" is. That, for example, there is somehow nothing worthwhile in the Best American Poetry 2004. At the same time this fellow reads here and there and is sent now and then poems that are real poems. And so the maddening fact that the Awful thrives always is, perhaps, in a merry way also a point of this poem.


ORSON: Jung told me that this was one of his favorite poems—that it accomplished what he was attempting to do with his ideas of 'active imagination', that is, the manifesting of archetypal images and their
energies by allowing one's psyche to emerge from behind the super-ego's
judgments. He was particularly fond of your choice of names for the
psychopomps— Buffy, Meghan et. al. Can you say a bit about why those
names were chosen and what you hoped to accomplish there? Is Jung
right that this what you intended?


JG: I wrote this in the eighties but I continually renew my acquaintance with these psychpomps.

ORSON: Let’s turn to a more recent work. Of Bell, Book and Candle,
one reviewer wrote: "He has one poem about Kim Novak and James Stewart in
Bell, Book and Candle that perfectly expressed the Technicolor genius
of Richard Quine, that film’s unsung genius director." Now, as a
cinematic soul myself, I can see this. But, and of course you may
disagree, what does this have to do with your particular genius? How
does the cinematic image affect what you do as an artist? And what of
the little colophon?

Here is the poem:

I always liked Kim Novak
In “Bell Book and Candle”
Curled up on that couch
Which you would describe as
Immensely red but you are wrong
For the colors that show best by candlelight
Are (she tells you) white, carnation and
And a kind of sea water green
And Pyewacket that lucky cat
Curled up next to you green eyes
And a sardonic glance
And you reach for the silver cigarette lighter
Man, you are as shaky as Jimmy Stewart
And it is Christmas! Christmas!
And you know she is a witch and
You want to ask her
Why she well.. has a tree…Let the room
Abound in light especially
Colored and varied
Or something like that. Witch? Christmas?
And she gets up and is on
Tiptoes placing the ornament just so
(“oes and spangs as they are of no great cost”)
On the tree and she knows what you are
Looking at. She knows.

Christmas? But if you ask she’ll say
Something like“The best art is general”
Which, really, you haven’t heard before
And she turns and the doors to the balcony
Open and snow swirls you out and you
Are both on the balcony. Manhattan!
And you know that Gene Kelly is
There somewhere feeling just a bit blue
But will anyway dance his way into
Someone’s heart tonight and snow is
Steepling on the Chrysler Building and
There is giant impossible yellow moon
And she is there and you

Know this poem ain’t going to end the way
You want it to.

JG: Yes, there you are in the dark gazing at a flickering image and somehow your eye must go there and then there, pull back, close up, and so on and before it was done in the movies it was done in poetry but who gets this really? I know you did and -- we can talk about this later -- that you know that Shakespeare invented the movies (oh, along with Marlowe and Cyril Tourneur and the rest). It's all of a piece and I noticed this and wrote about it, half understanding, when I wrote about all those speeches in the Bard's plays that are little narratives within the larger narrative. And somehow this is something I can somehow sometimes do. One of the blisses of this poem about movies (and masques and revels -- the knowing reader will find a way to see this -- allusion again and used in a merry way) is that it works like a movie. Close up to Jimmy's silver cigarette lighter and his shaky hand, the witch hangs an ornament on the tree and she knows she knows what you are looking at, last shot -- snow steepling the Chrysler building and that impossible movie moon all framed just so, music swells and then... Ha!

And ..have you asked about my masterpiece?. I have one even as the most neglected poet as recognized by the great souls of the Russian steppes and wedding cake academies must have one. It's "The Diamond at the End of Time" in all its splendid not anything like it a hell of a lot of fun and worlds there yes glory and it is one hell of a movie. Cuts, fades, swirling images, sailing aways, Fairbanks and Flynn and a damned fine fight scene.

So, yes, it's all about the movies.


ORSON: Cats figure prominently in your work, Joe. From Pyewacket
Tallpockets padding through halls, to the creations of Hitler's Cat,
you've created your own feline fantasies. It's been said that cats are
images of the unity of opposites—loyalty and independence, affection &
aggression, playfulness & dignity, curiosity & indifference, earthy
sensuality and an otherworldliness. Is this search for wholeness or
reunification a theme in your life and work?

JG: Thanks, Orson

Glad you reminded me. I need to pick up some Friskies Hairball Control cat food tonight. I "have" two cats. I've "had"...let me see if I can remember

Puddytat
Joey
Abe
Mean Man
Foo Foo
Iggy
Sarah
Sparkle

Didn't name any of them. Puddy lived to be 20. Joey died young -- about 8. Feline leukemia. Abe too -- died in my arms. Iggy -- killed by a car. Mean Man wandered away. Foo Foo (saved from Texas gypsy palm readers) was doing ok until my ex wife moved to West Texas and he was killed by a rodeo dog. Sarah and Sparkle both still with us.

But you're right about me and cats. As long as the cat come home. And cats have a sense of humor. I think there's a mannerism of solemnity that is pervasive in contemporary poetry that people mistake for gravitas. Somebody said that. Cat's won't put up with that.

Do you find Hitler's cat in a poetry workshop or lecturing at this and that conference by the sea? No -- too much respect for himself and a sense of the absurd that prevents it. You know -- there are a lot of questions contemporary poets should ask themselves and one is "What would Mehitabel do?"

Would Mehitabel reprehend a comic persona as the silly fellows so serious do? No.

And, Jesus, Orson you were a great actor. What do you make of legions of "creative" people who never assume a role, never act, don't know what to do with, for example, the gifts Rin Tin Tin offers just as an example? Or -- this leads to bigger questions. Why the hell is it that almost all contemporary poetry is devoid of humor and manages, at the same time, not to be serious?

Then all the twee poems of the many others that burst into light in the end.

What little joy and what can be done about it? The universe is bursting with giant forms and this is what we get? Or the absurd and unlikely and blissome ridiculous is everywhere offering an escape from the dwimmer of the dreary -- and they can't find it?

A certain sort of "seriousness" is imitated everywhere. Sadly, when a comic poem is attempted the "poem" part is missed. That is, the comic poem lets slip the surly bounds of ordinary comedy also -- there is a move to touch on a higher mirth, an uncommon wit, something free and of itself.

Hell, you know that. You understood Falstaff.

I sense some inkling of the comic and poetic in the lower realm of internet poetry. Some role playing -- with, mostly, nothing of the divine and blushful Hippocrene. The higher one ascends though the spheres of contemporary poetry the less chance there is of any glimmer of comic stardust. A cat won't put up with that.



ORSON: We haven't spoken much of your Doctoral project. Its not often
that an academician wanders the road less taken as you have.
How would you characterize your love of The Bard and your academic
interest in his works, and how does that square with your creative
opus?

JG: Orson, you loved Shakespeare above all and above all characters loved Falstaff so you already know that there is more of beauty and terror and wonder and freedom in Shakespeare than anywhere else. Others abide the question etc. He's the most mortal of poets -- simply because his immortal longings make the strongest claim ever but are forever denied. So, attention must be paid. Well of English must be kept undefiled and all that.

It's probably a secret that only a minority in most English departments actually give a rip about poetry. It's been that way since the beginning. There are so many other ways (all the loathsome schools of criticism) to make one's way. And only a remnant in any case anywhere have a feeling for poetry. So, for example Professor Donald Foster 12 or so years ago alleged that his computer study (word frequency etc) revealed that Shakespeare was the author of a certain Funeral Ode.

It was impossible to believe this if you had a sense for poetry. The fact that under the hideous Stephen Greenblatt the ode was admitted to the Norton is a tragicomic tale. But there it is.

Now, of course, Wallace admits a hideous mistake. But back in the beginning I was there with others of the remnant bashing him on the head. We finally got through. Jesus H Christ. And Greenblatt is the author of a best selling "Life" of the Bard. The point is that if Shakespeare needs protection from the barbarians at the gate we are all in danger. And I've met the best guardians in academia -- sneaking a smoke in their office, hiding from the department chairman, worrying if Milton really saw Shakespeare, spending their lives to establish a better text of "King Lear," dying in mysterious fires or -- when the gods are with them -- establishing their own departments in which they are the only member. Regents Professors at last!

Look -- the Lonliest ranger has recently been what is taken to be a little harsh with someone who bloviated about what Keats' "Negative Capability" meant and corrected him simply by pointing the fellow to the actual text. I don't have to guess. I know. This is dismissed as nitpicking -- and so the dreary round of untruth continues and everything is just what serves. Shit. Damn. That is exactly the system that enslaves the spirit -- not a trivial instance at all but another symptom and in a world of intellectual laziness and lies is just what is expected.

More or less this. I've known people who have given their lives over to a real quest for truth and for some flash of real poetry transmitted through them so... And the real mortal stakes are, sadly, elsewhere and lives are crushed every day by this sort of getting along. Poetry is whatever gets said in spite of systems of tyranny that seek to prevent the saying. Real academicians do what they can to speak through these systems and point to what is there.

Besides, they are my best audience for layers of wild and comic allusion. And somebody has to make them, for a second, kind of happy.

ORSON: When I was working on Citizen Kane, I often found myself
staying up late and reading Yeats to settle me down. As a fellow
Irishman, what do you and Yeats have in common?

JG: The colder eye.

ORSON: What is it about Keats' work that moves you so. After all, heseems so, well....dated and, if I may risk alienating you and fans ofhis, prissy. How does such a clearly masculine fellow as you yourself are
find this kind of maudlin treacle satisfying?

JG: No more manly poet, Orson. Perhaps I'll write about this.


ORSON: As we're nearly out of time here, I want to say how grateful I
am to have had this opportunity to chat blithely with you, Joe. You
are, as promised, as they say in the vernacular..a piece of work. What
are you working on now, and when can we expect more from you?

JG: Of course I want to do more to deserve my reputation as America's most neglected poet. However, with this and that offer coming in it will be difficult. But I have managed to screw most everything else up before and I do feel that I can do it again.

ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight! I hope we can speak together again. Anything you want to add..or want to ask me before we indulge in these two bubbling glasses of Muscatel?

JG: I hope you enjoy your time with Samson. Ask him to get out his guitar and play some flamenco. And, I think it would be a fine thing to do more of these. Perhaps with two poets at once chatting about what they chat about, glorying in each others work, having a sad and merry time!


ORSON: Thank you, Mr. Green, may your god go with you.


The Lonliest Ranger: And that concludes another exhilarating
confrontation of Mr. Orson Welles and the finest minds of today's poetry.We here at the Jeunesse Doree are pleased to have had you as our guests and look forward to seeing you again.

And please remember to investigate the brilliant, tragi-comic
adventures of the lost souls of the JD. Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow.

ORSON WELLES INTERVIEWS RIN TIN TIN

ORSON WELLES INTERVIEWS RIN TIN TIN

---

ANNOUNCER
Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles.

ORSON WELLES: Hello, the Jeunesse Doree and all the ships at sea and in the maelstromed starry welkin!

This is ORSON WELLES.

Our interview tonight is with Rin Tin Tin The Great. renowned actor (said to be the greatest Hamlet of his generation), author of The Dark Bark, Djangoiste and raccoonteur extraordinaire. On this particular evening the Crosley service estimates that thirty-seven point 239 billion creatures, mortal and immortal, are listening to us on their Zenith Trans-Cosmic radios. Zut alors!


ORSON: Mr. Tin Tin, or should I use Rin Tin Tin, or Rinty or...?

RTT: Call me anything. Just don’t call me late for dinner. Ah, Orson…Rinty…just call me Rinty.

ORSON: We share a great many things in common Rinty; we are men of the world, masters of our various crafts, romantics at heart, and, above all else, lovers of the fine beautiful. You once loved Lady Day, Billie Holiday, I once loved Judy Holiday. Despite your TV work, you were essentially a noiriste. The synchronicity of it! Will you tell us how you came to who you were? Lets begin with your dam and sire, shall we?

RTT:I never knew them, Orson. I'm an orphan and I am an American, Chicago born. I guess my real name is Moishe Herzog, Junior. Yeah, I'm a dog but I never even saw a dog until I saw Hettie in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show when it came to town. I was already seven years old! In fact I thought "dog" was my name. My owner was Moishe Herzog and I grew up in the back of his pawnshop. "Here, dog," he would say whenever he wanted to show me something in the Torah or more often to go down into the basement and get him a book or to bring up one of the lariats he would use to practice his rope tricks.. He was a strange guy. And, of course, so was I. All I knew was the pawnshop, the Torah, the Hebrew Spinoza and a variety of rope tricks. Though Moise would kill me for not saying "lariat." He was a great fan of the Wild West.

Here’s how it all started.


Picture this my friend. It's round midnight in Chicago and snowing -- I could see the flakes softly falling through the pawnshop window, no cars then so it's quiet, a hush. I am trying to sleep and not to sleep -- every night I had to go into the basement and bring up an old horse blanket and spread it right beneath the window. "Watch the shop, dog," Moishe would say as he left -- so this is how I thought I was to do it. Every night I tried to stay awake to watch the shop. Of course, I couldn't so when Moishe would come in the next morning and ask "Did you watch the shop last night, dog?" and I gave a little yap indicating, I guess, that I had, I felt incredibly guilty. He never seemed to notice that I was lying but I still felt guilty as hell.

Well, that night I was determined to stay awake and tried everything.

I was determined to memorize the Bible and was at all the "begats" and I thought that would keep me awake. The "begats" is one of the harder parts. The Book of Job? That's easy. But the "begats?" Oy veh! Suddenly there was a clatter and I was scared at hell because what I saw was this. Moishe in the fireplace (yes, we had one -- an old building --used to be the Marley Hotel I understand -- no gas, no coal furnace) -- but all dressed up in a red and white suit and cursing!

"Where the hell, am I?" Moishe asked.

I knew then it wasn't Moishe and, of course, what I should have done was, well, at least bark at him. But I didn't have time because -- get this -- there wasn't, for that instant (if that makes sense) any such thing as Time. I was frozen in that eternal instant and awake and watching what seemed to me to be a Santa Claus who had, perhaps, put too much rum in his eggnog. In other words I was caught in an eternal timeless instant watching God. Yes. Yes! Yes! Oh, it still affects me so.

Santa seemed confused. He didn't pay any attention to me at all. Just put down a sack he was carrying and looked around with a pissed off look on his face.

Suddenly, the door opened. It was locked and the door opened! and an elf came in.

Santa turned on the elf. "Did you screw up again? Isn't this supposed to be 19 Remington Avenue, Coatesville, Pa, 1958? Well, it looks a lot like a Pawnshop in 1917 to me!"

The elf just looked embarrassed.

"Pull the sled up out front. I'm not going up a chimney if I don't have to."

This is getting a little long.

Well Orson, Santa left. Time was again. I was changed forever. That little encounter with the Eternal changed me forever. I knew who I was and what I wanted to do. Santa left the sack behind and I took out what was in it: a banjo, a unicycle, A Charlie McCarthy doll and the Big/Little Book of English Poetry. Some kid in 1958 wasn't going to have a very nice Christmas. I got a rope from the basement, packed everything in the sack but the unicycle, tied the sack to my back got on the unicycle and hit the road. The rest is show biz history. Somehow I knew where I had to go. I got as far as the old Schubert theatre and cycled right in where some guys were practicing their act. Dec 25, 1917 7AM. Those guys were the Marx brothers. They were a bit surprised.

"I shot an elephant in my pajamas," I said (those were my first English words!)

"How he got in my pajamas I'll never know," Groucho replied. And we both laughed and eyed each other warily. Yes, always that...

My first act: I rode a unicycle and played the banjo while reciting scenes from Shakespeare in Yiddish. This is what I feel formed my sensibility. In other words – I performed America. I was a lousy ventriloquist.


ORSON: Of all your artistic endeavors; films, poetry, music, set and wardrobe design, and on the list goes, which gets most under your fur and why?


RTT: Yes, I did it all. And this will seem strange to you, Orson --after all I am being interviewed because of my work as a poet!-- but what I loved above everything else was Flamenco dancing. As I told you, I didn't know my parents but I love myself for the gypsy soul in me. This is funny. You want to know how I learned flamenco? This is the truth. I learned it with the help of Maria Ouspenskaya when we were making one of those Werewolf movies. I played the wolf -- see him briefly in the moonlight -- that lurks about wanting the soul of the werewolf. Or something! I forget.

Christ, it might even have been "Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman." But one night Maria took me out to a bar in L.A. I had never been to before. ( I didn't think there were any): the "Ola Harpo!" and there I drank Sangria and saw flamenco dancing for the first time.

I'm sorry. I'm not very good as an audience and suddenly I was across from a very attractive young gypsy lad with a rose in my teeth. It just came naturally. Oh, how they smiled and applauded as I danced and I was overcome then by the duende. A flash of the tragic divine and I wanted it always and could get it yes I could of nights when the wolfbane bloomed and the moon was large and full and I was dancing with my gypsy friends!

I tried to teach it, off an on, to my Hollywood friends. None of them were any good. But we had a lot of laughs. Bogie almost got it. We would be on his boat with Bacall she laughing as Bogie tried to give himself over to those lunar rhythms and then gave up and he would grab me and bring me close and we would end up doing a tango there on his boat on the sea. A questioning but, perhaps, knowing look on Bacall's face as she watched us and sensed my discomfort. No, I am not implying anything of the usual here. It was the failure to attain the duende she sensed and my kindness when I covered it up with what was, of course, a COMIC tango. Poor Bogie. Bacall has a new movie I understand.


ORSON: Fascinating, and if we had time, there is much there to be pursued. Yet let us turn, if we may, to your early poems. Here is one I am fond of:

What a Little Moonlight Can Do

Three days after Bastille day
Behind the shut up café
In a broke down car
(Hard to gas yourself
If the car won’t start)
In Cross Plains, Texas
Thinking I saw nothing
More than myself
Reflected in my Les Paul
Black Beauty that night
I step out of my 1971
Ford Maverick the
Door operated courtesy
Light snicking on and
Look up at the sky
At all the tired animals
Stars bluewhitelonely
Thinking of that night
At the Three Deuces so
Long Ago and playing at
The Famous Door
The night Billy died
Errol Garner, Me, Oscar
Pettiford, Errol saying
You better than Django
But nobody will ever say it.
Not knowing Billy was dead
I was happy. Looking up
I say at the skyey animals
The old dog in the moon
Ending like this
Saying to the drunks
In the cowboy bar
This riff is based on Les Negres
By Jean Genet laughing
At myself really and now
Wanting it to end but
The car won’t start. Looking
Up I remember I told Billy
Radiance is the dealbreaker
And heard, radio definably off
Her singing “What a Little
Moonlight Can Do” and
That was the last time
I was truly happy and
I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again

Tired.

Pancake

Levelland

Mule Shoe

Sonora

Meadow

What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!




This is absolutely splendid, Rinty! The poem crosses so many lines, is inclusive in the way it brings the pathos of the great artist into sharp focus with its carefully chosen images. Bastille Day, of course! One feels the poem begins with the afterparty let down when freedom fails to live up to its promise. And then the emptiness: images of lonely, skywalking animals, brokedown cars behind honkytonk bars. The lacquered cruelty of the Les Paul reflecting it all back at you. And your love dead, unbeknownst to you. And the choppy, riff driven rhythm. Please tell us more!

RTT: Well, it's not exactly an early poem. There were all those poems I wrote with Don Marquis and those horrible "philosophical" poems I wrote after I read Heidegger but this lovely poem ( and it does everything you say it does and more!) was written around 1985.
The events took place in 1971.

Look, the Bastille day reference is there for several reason. It was the day Lady died and is described just that way in a poem of Frank O'Hara's.

A damn fine poem. Now we go all darkling. Orson, you know I killed O'Hara. Ran him down accidentally while I was drunk and driving a dune buggy on the beach on Fire Island. I recognized him and shouted "O! Frank O'Hara! Look out!" Which,since it follows his style and were the last words he heard, should have been his epitaph.

Why was I drunk and driving a dune buggy at night on Fire Island?

I warn you, Orson we will get into the strange and the very strange as we continue...but let's leave it alone for now.

The events in this poem really happened. This was one of the low points of a long life. I was playing country guitar -- not as Rin Tin Tin but as Merle Shepherd. I wore jeans, cowboy hat, a shirt with little sheep on it, and dark glasses and very uncomfortable Tony Lama Ostrich hide boots and had an act doing Hank Williams covers. I felt I needed to be lost -- I WAS lost. Sometimes I would get paid. Sometimes not. I even robbed a Dry Goods store in Fairy, Texas once when I was hungry and needed gas. Sometimes I couldn't help it and would play solid gone jazz and sneer at my audience and do an old Lenny Bruce schtick. I slept in my car and there was oblivion and I drank. I'll tell you why later. I get the idea you will know what to ask. But, yeah, I had the hose hooked up through the window and I was going to poison myself and then the damn car wouldn't start and the radio was off and I anyway heard Billy again there behind the cafe singing that song. And I remembered her for that instant and she was dead but -- and the stars bluewhiteand lonely, the tied animals...we are all so tired when these is death and I realized I shoudn't give myself to death but just go on...

"I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again

Tired.

Pancake

Levelland

Mule Shoe

Sonora

Meadow

What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!"



RTT: To sleep, perchance to dream, but in that dream...

So it went. But I did try to find that music again. As this poems shows...as this poem shows.



ORSON: How did you and Billie meet? Where you ever addicted to heroin?


RTT: No, I never had anything to do with the big H. Even when playing Jazz guitar. It killed so many of my friends. And my greatest love. I had a problem with the booze but not until after a certain day in November 1963.

Billy and I met in the late forties at a little Jazz club in Harlem. You should know, Orson. You went there thinking you were still loved after your production of the Blank Macbeth. I was playing. She came out and sang from --I don't know -- backstage or Eternity. We fell instantly in love as she and I became one song as she sang "Strange Fruit."

I guess just the title of that song describes our relationship...

Excuse me for a second, (weeps).

ORSON: When she died on July 17, 1959 you went to Cuba. You wrote this, you told me, looking over the Malecon from your hotel window after going to mass at the Iglesia de San Francisco de Asis over which portal is inscribed non est in toto sanctior orbe locus—no holier place on earth. Castro had just come to power and you wrote:

1953

1953 was a hard year for me.
Sad. I don’t know why.
I had work. Me and Bob Mitchum
Were friends at last. After all
Those misunderstandings. “You want to
Break out?” I asked him. “Then forget
All this crap about being a natural actor.”
I took his drink away. Got his attention.
“Acting is a craft. Don’t scowl at me.
You know I’m right. You’ll never
Do Shakespeare unless…” He eyed me warily.
“Yo, Rinty,” he said. “You have Billy”
( I had told him) “What do I have?”
He fired up another Chesterfield.
Squinted through the smoke.
“Nothing happens anyway.”

Nothing happens?
I knew what he meant.
I was getting there.

He grinned. “How the Hell did you
Do that to McCarthy?”
I gave him back his drink.
“Told him I was a commie, that’s how.
“I’m an American Icon, Bob. It was too much for him.
Goodbye Tailgunner Joe.”

Bob laughed but he didn’t believe me.
He was really quite a charming man
Guys who don’t believe in anything often are.
So he could be a gentleman to Rita Hayworth
Down in Mexico, her mind gone. But…
A bastard to everyone else.
Nothing in his eyes.

And I was sad there.
It was New York. September 13, 1953.
Another dive, Another gig.
Bob left with a blonde before I began to play.
I started to play but just walked out.
It was the night Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey had
Finally gotten together again.
They kept playing while I put down my guitar.

They never forgave me.

“A” train to Harlem.
Got in Billy’s DeSota and drove.

In a few hours
Lost in Pennsylvania.
Stopped. Don’t know why.
Got out. Looked up. Falling star.
Not me. Something from forever.

Finally found a town.
Asked a little guy outside a hospital for directions.
“We just had a baby girl,” he said.

I drove back to my life.

It seems to me that several important things are happening here. On the poetic level, there is a kind of hyper-realism, a cinematic use of hard focus and quick cuts to close ups, then a pulling away all within the context of a 'dialogue' between you and Mitchum. This severity dissolves toward the end in sadness and loss, and a bone to Creeley, perhaps "driving back to my life".

We are carried along perhaps a bit like a star-struck visitor to Schwabs reading Silver Screen and gaping at celebrity diners. I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but I think there's a deeper movement here. Perhaps it was just the rum?

RTT: There is so much here, Orson. So much strange. Remember those gifts from Santa I picked up in 1917 in that pawnshop in Chicago? The gifts that were to be delivered to a certain address in 1958 in Pennsylvania? Well, those gifts were intended for the young Joe Green! Yes, the poet right here. After my death I communicated through him as a kind of way to make up for the loss of the banjo and unicycle and Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist’s dummy and we are and have been cosmically and mythopoetically linked. The last lines in that poem -- well September 13, 1953 is his wife's birthday and the little guy I met outside of the hospital in Pennsylvania was her father and it was that new and blessed and splendid little life that brought me hope again.

The rest -- yes, I brought down McCarthy. If Rin Tin Tin was a communist then nothing meant anything. He never recovered. This is a poem about hope, Orson and damn fine it is that you notice all the slidings and blisses. Thank you.


ORSON:Eventually, you were forced to flea Cuba. What happened with you and Fidel that forced your return to the States

RTT: Do I sense a pun on “flee?” The first time I left Cuba I was sent. We’ll get into that. The second time was …here..here’s the poem:

Los Marielitos

You know Elmore Leonard
got a lot of his Florida schtick from me
when I was sobering up down in Miami.

I guess it was inevitable that I would
get involved with the mob after I fled Cuba
but it didn't start out that way.

May, 1980. They called us Los Marielitos.

I was one of 123,000 new Cuban refugees
that came to the USA in a short five months,
including about 5,000 of us who
were said to be hard-core criminals.

They crossed the ocean on a prayer.

On crowded, unsafe fishing boats.

On rafts held together by tires.

In search of a myth. Carrying only the
clothes on their backs, a passport, and a
crumbled piece of paper with a relative's phone number in the US.

I knew better.
The myth was over for me long ago.

I had Lassie's phone number but of course I would never call it.
She was probably dead and it was a whole new generation and
here I was, the icon of a previous generation, puking half
digested red beans over the side of a raft.

Back in the USA. Back in the USA
done in by the hype back then and by,
yes, my own yen to do serious theatre

Fidel expelled me because I was a drunk, because I was better than he was and he knew it, because he owed me BIG TIME, because he trid to kill me but failed and a voodoo curse was placed on his hairy ass that he could only avoid by getting me out of Cuba. The pretext was thatI was doing street theatre as Trotsky.


ORSON: We have this from that early period by in New York. I understand you did your own swordplay?

No, I Am Not Prince Hamlet Nor Was Meant To Be

You humans are so predictable.

In fact for years most dogs
were convinced that you were utterly
without self consciousness -- without Mind.

After all, we present a stimulus to you
and we ALWAYS get a predictable response.

The fact is we have such a horror

of the fact

that we can NOT be sincere
that we do whatever we can
to make it stop.

Yeah, a dog will pant
and bark and bring the
damn ball back again and again and again

-- we do it to keep from going mad,
to hope to experience
just for an instant unmediated
unironic consciousness, to --for just one instant
-- be THERE, be in the moment.

It never works.

Never.

That's why we die so young
and it is also why I was,
on a foggy evening OFF OFF Broadway
in a little theatre in the year 1959,

I was, simply put,


the best Hamlet of my generation.




ORSON: Obviously, you were in a philosophical mood here. The poem is quite different than the previous offering. Thoughts are heaved over the transom of regret to drag the depths of your dog nature. Images of Sisyphus and his rock, Skinnerian behavioral psychology, and Buddhist meditation are all brought together in a stunning denouement. Hamlets self-disillusionment is palpable here, yet it doesn't matter that you were "Off Off Broadway" does it? Humans, you seem to be saying, just don't get it. What are we missing?

RTT: This is a poem about consciousness. The first line-- changed at the end by the fact that I was Hamlet -- is Eliot's and is a deliberate deepening of his poem. It gives the facts. Dogs die young because they despair. I saw the eternal so most times I was able to overcome doggy consciousness. See yourself -- humanity -- from a dog's point of view. But I was never one to succumb to the dark.

I did all my own stunts. Always.



ORSON: In 'Road Kill' you seem to have come to some kind of crossroads. Perhaps the intimations of mortality were stronger. We all return to our roots as our time grows short. Here, unlike your other early works, you recognize something of your animal nature:

Road Kill

I ignore them.
The possum squashed on the macadam.
The unprophetic groundhog, in Texas
A holocaust of Armadillos, the skunk
“Skunk. God!” you say.
Driving on, a snake absolutely flat on the road.

There is no heaven of animals
A rabbit. A black and white cat.
A small dog stinking in the sun.

You see them and you make up a story.
The dog setting out to warn us all:
Fire, fire in the forest! The turtle there
100 years old!... what thoughts there, Rinty?
And what innocence for all of them.

I’m glad one of us knows the signs
To find our home.



We're all hoping to fine our way home in the end. Did your succeed here in saying what needed to be said?


RTT: This is a poem of divided consciousness. It’s again about that despairing time in Texas. There are two Rintys here. One of us can find the way home and that way is the way I knew I had to follow. I wanted to rescue what IS from death. Knew I couldn’t so wanted the poem to say “Seize the Day.”

ORSON: This may come as a surprise to you, but we have something quite special now. Would you read this for us please and comment on the wonderful artwork that accompanies it?

RinTinTology

I never met Django
Never really wanted too, I guess
We would have “eyed each other warily”
Like the time I met Senator Jack Kennedy
Was it 57?
In the Cozy Cole me playing there
Jack with Sammy
Sammy told me he was nervous.
Jack working on his charisma thing
And me.. height of my fame
Billy there Jack wanting her to come to his table
Her not noticing and me looking at her
Playing “Vous et Moi”
Sammy said “Man, come on down see who’s here.”
So afterwards I sit down next to the Senator
He in black glasses smoking a Kool
Undercover or something
Billie came over. She said she liked the man
Afterwards, knew his Daddy… called him
Mr. Death. “That boy has troubles”
She said. “He was just nervous meeting me”
I told her. She could see that.
Anybody could. “He eyed you warily
Behind those shades” We laughed.
Forgot about it. I had something he wanted.
And he had something…something…
Held back… connection to.. as if he knew
About us, about me and Billy,
Something he said. Joking about Howard Hughes.
Sammy told me Jack laughed afterwards.
“Said he was nervous. Something strange. Didn’t
Know why.”

In 63 in August Castro “eyed me warily.”
A little moonlight, bourbon on his breath,
Backstage, the little moon a paper one
For “Midsummers Night Dream” A wood near
Athens and I had transformed it, a bit of Brecht,
All of Shakespeare, Theseus nervous knowing
That Quince knew, Flute knew, Bottom breaking
the frame, declaring the revolution and me as Puck
Leaping, flying off that stage, like Peter Pan
TO FIDEL he standing up, smiling,
Me kneeling with the flowers but he
Afterwards backstage distant and cold wondering I thought
If the applause was for him or me.

Che was very nice, however.
Speaking one word… one word.
And I was in Dallas next was in Dallas then.

If I could play great jazz guitar
No hand…only paws.
Why couldn’t I
Slowly, hold breath, there he is
Pull the trigger
Of a Manlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle?




RTT: When I first came to Cuba I founded a wonderful proletarian theatre and our first play was a version of the Dream. Theseus and the rest of the ruling class are shot offstage at the end. I played Puck. This wonderful drawing shows me presenting flowers to Castro.
Castro feared my popularity. Ok. I’ll say it. You saw the Manchurian Candidate? That’s what those bastards did to me – they programmed me so that a certain word would trigger what it did. A few days after that I was in Dallas. I shot the president. I hope you will post all my poems in the JD right after that so that the story can be followed with that insight.

The artwork was, I think, part of the plot. It was done by the guy who played Flute in our performance.

I killed JFK. No wonder I was drunk and playing country guitar all those years. The word was “Rosebud.”




ORSON: When I was working on Citizen Kane, I often found myself staying up late and reading Yeats to settle me down. Do you have favorite poets that you turn to? If so, would you share a favorite with us?



RTT: Yeats, Auden, Eliot, the Bard. God bless all poets!




ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight! Before we go, however, we must discuss the triad of works that marks
your greatness even as you prepared to leave this world. Lets begin with this remarkable view drawing on Homer's
great exposition of life's inevitable arc.

Letter from a Dog Before Troy

Dear Penelope,

It's windy here. Nine years in a tent on the beach.
Ulysses says they know what they're doing.

Right.

Nine years and for what?
What’s nine years to them?

Most of my life.
I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.
There’s a limit to loyalty.

But you already know that.

I know about the puppies.
You should have told me.
She told me, of course.
I don’t care.
Just get them out of Ithaca.

By the time you read this
I’ll be gone. I have..what..four more years?
Going to someplace where there are no men.
No gods.
Maybe a few rabbits.

Now you go on to treat the great themes of love, death and our position on the sacred wheel of time. There is bitterness here. God knows your life has not been an easy one, yet the loneliness of a world without men? What happened here?

RTT: Now you know. I changed history in a way I would never have wanted. Am I guilty or not. Somehow I can’t feel myself blameless.
Original sin.


ORSON: And yet you then can write:

All the Starry Animals

Looking up
I love them too --
All the starry animals.
Looking down
Or not.
Not saying anything.
Not saying nothing either.

There is a soul clearly in conflict here. Yet in the end there is acceptance. Is it merely what Eliot called
" the long looked forward to, long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity and the wisdom of age" or is there something canine at work here?

RTT: The want for the love that moves the sun and other stars is there.

ORSON: And then there is this:

Old Dog: A Villanelle

I am an old dog and am gently trying,
To meekly go to the difficult dark..
Alone, alone I am slowly dying.

The slow snow drifts down and no wind sighing.
Take out a Zippo and light up a Lark.
No regrets none. No who and no whying.

Sad ghosts outside I hear them all crying.
Mort Sahl’s on TV. Makes a funny remark.
No, thanks Time/Life I guess I’m not buying.

Death’s at the door. The bastard is lying.
“Hey, Rinty! It’s Lassie!” One small sad bark.
Wilder wind now. The snowflakes are flying.

Good Night has come. There is no denying.
Unknown is that country. Stark is the bark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.

And you, who haunt me forever sighing,
Crying my name in the difficult dark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am alone and am dying, dying.

I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying

Alone, alone I am slowly dying
I am alone and am dying, dying.

And here we have the only reference in your work to Lassie. Lassie, who was better known, better paid, and more highly thought of than you, if for all the wrong reasons. Beyond that there are echoes of Dylan Thomas' raging against the dying of the light. Clearly the end is at hand. How were you able to do this remarkable work so near to death?


RTT: I never even knew what a villanelle was when I wrote it. The difficult dark – yes! Exactly and here is my epitaph.

I bark at at the dark until the darkness yields.
As you go stark. Babbling of green fields.




Yours,

Rinty



Orson: And on that noble note, my old faithful friend, our duet is done and for now we must bid adieu. On behalf of our listeners and our sponsor, The Jeunesse Doree, I would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, Rinty and wish you Dogspeed!


The Lonliest Ranger: And that concludes another exhilarating confrontation of Mr. Orson Welles and the finest minds of today's poetry.

We here at the Jeunesse Doree are pleased to have had you as our guests and look forward to seeing you again.

And please remember to investigate the brilliant, tragi-comic
adventures of the lost souls of the JD. Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow.

RIN TIN TIN: ARF! ARF!